[Kde-accessibility] Some AT-SPI questions

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

Gary Cramblitt:
> It would be nice if someone fully knowledgeable about the KDE plan could
> update the accessibility.kde.org website and explain all this so we
> developers can have a better understanding.

Yes, indeed. The reason I have not done this yet is that we don't have a final 
decision yet how to best move AT-SPI onto DBUS. I am myself learned a lot in 
this thread.

> I *think* it breaks down to 3 possible scenarios:
>
> 1.  How can KDE developers write KDE 3 AT clients today (using ATK bridge)?

AT don't use the atk bridge. Today, you need to either use cspi or at-spi 
directly.

> 2.  How can they develop AT clients with KDE4 libraries in conjunction with
> Gnome libraries?

Once a bridge from the Qt4 Accessibility Framework or atk or to at-spi 
directly is installed, AT clients don't need to bother about which toolkit 
the applications use.

> 3.  How will KDE devs develop AT clients when the AT-SPI DBUS version is in
> place and how do we get there?
>
> The IDL compiler approach strikes me as the most plausible way forward for
> #3.

I fully agree. Such an IDL compiler would allow us to have native bindings 
based on QObject.

> I say this because very few people in the KDE community understand 
> Bonobo/ORBit2  enough to do the port.  Is anyone working on such a
> compiler? How difficult would it be to do that and how would one get
> started if one were inclined to work on it?

The best person to answer this is Harald Fernengel. He is currently in holiday 
and will then be very busy until the end of this year with adding Qt4 
interfaces into the LSB database.

> If anyone wants to write this up (whatever format you like), I'd be happy
> to post it on the website.

That would be great. I can help you with this, of course.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/